5 Responses to “that’s a lotta radiohead”

this becomes less exciting as we move to a decentralized/online storage model.

Right, except that we’re not. People are creating their own multimedia content, being sold bloatier operating systems and applications, downloading High-Definition movies, and playing games. There is more being stored on the average user’s drive than ever before, and any online storage market growth is:

1) still too insignificant to make a dent in traditional storage needs,
2) still requiring the use of storage somewhere to hold that data, requiring someone to buy that hard drive,
3) unrealistic with current and near-future broadband speeds – especially in Canada.

Distributed storage is growing, but generally within a household or office space among several computers, serves, game consoles, media centers, etc… all devices which use (and demand) bigger and faster storage.

I think it’s great to be able to keep a copy of information elsewhere on the Internet in case of a fire or theft affecting your local data, but it seems like widely distributed storage isn’t the best bet when you want to search or analyze large chunks of your information quickly. As the storage gets bigger and bigger, even local buses, like SATA, can become a bottleneck. If you’re connecting to a virtual hard disk over TCP/IP there’s a really large protocol overhead. You’d be hard pressed to do a grep -r on 3TB of data and get meaningful results in a reasonable time.

I remain optimistic about continued demand for increasingly large hard disks. Recently I’ve been drooling over this external raid array which addresses the reliability issue while having the ease of use of an external USB2 or eSATA disk.

hi gordon, being a mostly-un-techie, thre search side of the equation hadn’t occurred to me. still google manages to search the entire web pretty well …but thinking a bit about that i’m not sure the analogy works: if you are storing data online, chances are you don’t want it public, so the vast search reasource of the google monster won’t really be relevant.

we’ll see where it goes. but as everyone knows, you always need as much hard drive as you have after a few months, and a few more months and usually you don’t have enough. i guess we’ll just expand to fit whatever is there.